Peppino paused for an instant and then continued: "These preliminary details, Signor Count, are necessary to enable you to understand the conspiracy which was speedily to be hatched. The peasant, who had conducted Massetti and your son to the very spot the former had left Rome to seek, was Annunziata's brother. Old Pasquale Solara was absent from home at the time of the arrival of the strangers, but returned shortly afterwards. I have no doubt that he had long been in league with Luigi Vampa and had been secretly acting as his agent and confederate. At any rate, when he arrived he was well aware that the young men were at his cabin and was also thoroughly informed as to their identity, though, with his habitual cunning, he concealed both facts, feigning surprise and dissatisfaction when it was announced to him by his children that he had guests. Secretly he was delighted, for the presence of young Massetti gave him an opportunity at once to take a signal revenge on the old Count, whom he had long bitterly hated, and to divert the crashing stigma of a fiendish act he meditated from himself to the name and fame of another."

"Do you mean to assert that this wretched old man had base designs against his own daughter?" said the Count, his visage expressing all the horror he felt.

"Exactly," answered Peppino, coolly. "Old Solara, miserable miser as he is, had for a very large sum of the gold he so ardently coveted sold his own child, his beautiful daughter Annunziata, to the bandit chief Luigi Vampa!"

"The black-hearted demon!" exclaimed Monte-Cristo. "He is unworthy of the name of man! In Paris the indignant populace would crush him to death beneath their feet!"

"So, you see," resumed the Italian, "the arrival of Massetti was opportune, and Pasquale Solara, after having seen that the Viscount was safely housed beneath the roof of his cabin, hastened back to Luigi Vampa and together they laid the foul plot that succeeded but too well. A more shrewdly devised and thoroughly concealed piece of diabolical villainy has never stained the annals of the civilized world!"




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